She’s known as Mini-AOC.
In real life, she’s Ava Martinez of Lake Forest, California. Her videos making fun (in a light way) of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York used to explode on social media. On Twitter, her handle is @realminiAOC (and she really does look like the Democratic socialist beloved by liberals).
But 10 days ago, her account got locked. And in the last few days, her 250,000+ followers — which include such notables as filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and political commentators Ryan Fournier and Sebastian Gorka — have started to wonder what happened to her.
Chuck Callesto, a former Republican candidate in Florida’s 3rd Congressional District, was among those who figured it out. “BREAKING REPORT: Mini AOC @realminiaoc fan account LOCKED OUT of twitter for age restriction and facing deactivation DESPITE claim it is owned and RUN BY HER PARENTS, dispute system for account currently down,” he wrote on May 24.
So we checked in with Ava’s stepfather, Salvatore Schachter, to find out the real story.
“In May of 2019, Ava’s mom and I started the @realminiaoc account on Twitter after a video she did impersonating AOC went viral,“ he said in an email. “People enjoyed her larger-than-life personality, great sense of humor and many talents like dancing and acting and we enjoyed sharing in it as a family. Since then we’ve grown the account to just over 250K followers.”
“The vast majority of impressions over the years have been extremely sweet and kind with some negativity here and there but overall we’ve had fun sharing Ava’s charm through social media all along the lines of a parody account,” he said.
For instance, Ava was featured in a 2019 video shortly after Ms. Ocasio-Cortez put out her Green New Deal plan.
“Like, hello America, AOC here again,” Ava said in the clip. “But this time from Washington, D.C., which is named after our first president — George Washington D.C.”
“Like, I want to tell you about my plan to single-handedly save the planet. I call it the Green New Deal. I picked green because I’m still learning my colors. I came up with my plan after we were watching, like, the most important documentary on climate change. It’s called ‘Ice Age 2: The Meltdown,’” she said, referring to the animated kids’ movie. “That’s not me saying it, that’s science.”
But things started to change recently, despite Elon Musk’s move to purchase the platform — which came with his pledge to open it up to conservatives and liberals alike.
“There’ve been a few emails from Twitter warning that we’ve been reported for a tweet but it was always advised that the tweets were found to be not in violation of Twitter’s rules because we’re not in any way offensive,” her stepfather said. “We’re just trying to make people laugh and see Ava for the talented kid she is.”
Schachter said that on May 23, he received an email from Twitter advising that the account was locked due to Ava — now 11 — being under the minimum age requirement of 13 years old. But that’s odd, he said, because “the account is in my name, I’m well over 13 years old of course and it says right in our bio that parents are running this account.”
Ava’s stepdad has his own theory about why the account has been shut down.
“I feel we were locked out now because our account has been growing rapidly since Elon Musk announced his bid for Twitter and our views resonate with our followers while running contrary to Twitter’s views. Just further proof of Twitter silencing conservative accounts even if it’s just your average American parents and their talented daughter trying to give a few laughs.”
While it was just a family fun account, Schachter said, “Ava is extremely disappointed we’re in danger of losing our account and our outlet to so many wonderful people.” And he noted that the account has done good, raising more than $10,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
“It’s very sad to know we won’t be able to do that again without the support of all of our followers,” he said.
Since being locked out, Ava’s stepfather says they have tried to resolve the issue, but “the page to dispute being locked out has been down for going on eight days now, leaving us no recourse at all to unlock our erroneously suspended account. Adding insult to injury, you can get to the dispute page for locked out accounts but only from an account that is not locked out and you can’t do anything on the page unless your account is locked. It’s unbelievable.”
Musk has vowed to level the playing field on Twitter, which has always leaned hard left. Let’s see if he puts his money – all $44 billion he’s set to spend to buy the platform — where his mouth is.
Joseph Curl covered the White House for a dozen years and ran the Drudge Report for four years. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @JosephCurl. A version of this article ran previously in The Washington Times.